Looking at pre- and postwar abstract murals, this book considers how artists responded to the role of art in everyday life.
The desire to free abstract art from the spatial confines of easel painting and the social confines of the art world galvanized midcentury American artists. Abstract painters from Ilya Bolotowsky to Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock turned to muralism to “unframe” their abstractions. This book examines a range of abstract murals made in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s that transformed living and working spaces into dynamic, immersive art environments for a broad public audience.
Using archives, blueprints, and digital reconstruction, Abstraction Unframed returns abstract murals—often removed from their original sites—to the architectural spaces where they first met their viewers. Emily S. Warner shows how abstract murals were engaged in significant American cultural projects, from New Deal populism to the ideology of the midcentury home to debates over the crisis of humanism in postwar corporate culture. Located at the interface of art, architecture, and daily living, abstract murals embody one of modernism’s most enduring fantasies: to bridge the domains of art and life.
The book features painted and mosaic murals created for
• New Deal public housing and hospitals
• 1940s domestic spaces
• Postwar office towers